


Haruspicina

by CancerConstellation



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: A Bit Romantic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Monster!AU, a bit gothic, hermann is 17 and newt is 16, mythological creatures, some violence??, something in between, will add more tags as they become relevant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:26:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9100402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CancerConstellation/pseuds/CancerConstellation
Summary: The depth of the dark that surrounded him had been incomprehensible from the outside. Shafts of sunlight sporadically scanned through the underbrush in very small wisps of brightness. His feet were not visible, treading through sloughing mud and limp grass. The buzzing kept increasing in volume the further in he went. Walls of thick ivy on every surrounding side seemed to vibrate with a slow crawling movement. His breath, heavy with the oppressive weight of stale air, quickened. And finally, the enclosure had an exit. This outcrop proved both more hospitable than the maze and less, because Hermann saw something—someone. In the isolated flush of clotted green and nonexistent breeze, Hermann found a boy. He was sprawled out, chest lightly rolling with every breath. His dark hair spread out in thick curls against a large rock, dewy with a copious spread of moss. Hermann feared, at first, that he had stumbled upon death.





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> Haruspicina (AKA haruspicy)- a form of divination provening from the Ancient Rome that entailed the reading of omens from the inspection of entrails. 
> 
> Just for reference:  
> Hermann is 17  
> Newt is 16

 

_“For watchful, lurking mid th’ unrustling reed,_

_At those mirk hours the wily monster lies.”_

_—William Collins, “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry”_

 

Sunlight poured in through the small window, setting the dust-motes aflame and passing right through Hermann’s hand. The glowing webbing between his fingers captured his attention, as he turned his hand to and fro. The shadow of his veins showed through the delicate skin.

Small droplets of sweat condensed on his skin, caught in the fine hairs of his arms or resting idly on his upper lip. The humidity came early this year. Despite all the open windows of the house, the heavy drapes prevented the smallest gust of wind to come through. Even if the rest of the house managed some proportion of coolness, his room was plagued with a perpetually stagnant air. The sweat seeped through his shift onto the bedding below him and left his back pressed against a warm wetness that was stifling. In escaping the suffocating tendrils of restlessness, he fell into his preparation routine.

He hadn’t meant to look in the mirror. He tended to avoid the mirror, in all its shadowed intricacies. However, he’d hung his vest over the brass decoration at the top, and as he’d leant over to grab it he’d looked. His father insisted that sons in the Gottlieb family did not wear their hair long, so he’d ordered Lillian to cut it. Cropped, shorn at the nape and longer on top, his hair drooped damply onto his forehead. Disarmingly thin, his arms dangled loosely in his white button-up. A glance was all he needed before he slipped his vest on and meticulously brushed off the lint from it.

Perhaps his morning could have begun with some sort of respite in the form of an errand’s run to the chicken coop outdoors in the breeze, but this was not the case. That day, they were to have visits. It was not a common ordeal, but not an entirely foreign one either. Hermann could count on both hands the amount of visits they’d had in the past. They never boded particularly well for him. This time it meant that he had to dedicate the better part of his day to polishing, wiping, decorating, and washing the house.

The house was never particularly dirty at any one time, as he was always cleaning it. It was his father’s favorite method of an eternal punishment for his particular sin of having been a troublesome child to birth—too troublesome. The tasks were never equally distributed either. His brother was required only to attend to his own needs. Handsome and witty Brian was easily forgotten at the moment something went wrong. It seemed Hermann was the harbinger of bad tidings.

Dedication and precision bore him through the day as he rubbed sheen back into the rails of the staircases, fingered the dust at the corners, vacuumed the carpets, and aired out all the rooms. The silt that gathered on every surface clung to the embroidery on his vest. Windows groaned and creaked their joints as he patiently eased them open to the air. His shoes were abandoned along the way and eventually the bottoms of his feet were soot black.

So embroiled in his task, he allowed himself to be consumed by the orderliness of it—the numerical precision. It was always a controlled repetition of movement, and this constant soothed him to an almost calm state of mind. Though his fingers smarted and peeled from the strong chemicals, his muscles aching, his mind felt serenely unattached to whatever complications could arise in the following hours.

Finished, he slung the last of many darkened rags into a plastic bag and sat down. He was left with the distinct feeling that despite all of his efforts, the house still had a desolate impression imbued in every filament. The boggy outdoors, often overwrought with tangling vines and the steadily shrill sounds of insects, served to augment the remote and vaguely decrepit surroundings. He felt like he’d crafted a beautiful husk for rot.

His father wanted the fireplace lit for his guests. The thought was almost unfathomable to Hermann in the cloying heat, but he had stopped rebelling against his father’s mandates long ago.

The breeze shifted sluggishly through the musty indoors and filtered through the house, but the temperature change from inside to outside was still enough to make his skin feel clammy when he exited the edifice. A cacophony of croaks, chirps, and burbles accompanied him during the trek around the building. Though he was glad to be out of the house, the lands were of a temperamental sort and seemed to bear an ill will to those who would inhabit it. In some sections, it would be unexpectedly and dangerously marshy, his leg sinking in up to his calf. Others were more unpleasantly infested with mosquitoes or fleas.

Firewood was at the edge of the forest. The edge was tainted with the dank mugginess of the forest, outlying as it may have been. It smelled of dampness under the long shadows of the trees. Hermann had never dared go into the forest, or into the landscaped labyrinth that was at its outskirts. He’d stopped being curious about it when it sealed itself after years of disuse, the green growing over. Absently, he noticed the water blisters that began to pimple his fingers as he picked out the wood. Out there nothing was dry, but he had to choose the best pieces.

The wood was snugly in his arms as he began walking back. The maze’s shrubbery had been cut back and the entrance was unexpectedly open. The path was poorly lit, more like a bruise than an archway. Hermann stopped and deliberated. There was still time for him to be well dressed or well hid and for the fire to start, before the guests arrived. If he decided to follow the maze, he should not get too badly lost. Childhood curiosity beckoned him to the wound, and he set down the wood at the portal.

The depth of the dark that surrounded him had been incomprehensible from the outside. Shafts of sunlight sporadically scanned through the underbrush in very small wisps of brightness. His feet were not visible, treading through sloughing mud and limp grass. The buzzing kept increasing in volume the further in he went. Walls of thick ivy on every surrounding side seemed to vibrate with a slow crawling movement. His breath, heavy with the oppressive weight of stale air, quickened.

And finally, the enclosure had an exit.

This outcrop proved both more hospitable than the maze and less, because Hermann saw something—someone. In the isolated flush of clotted green and nonexistent breeze, Hermann found a boy.

He was sprawled out, chest lightly rolling with every breath. His dark hair spread out in thick curls against a large rock, dewy with a copious spread of moss. Hermann feared, at first, that he had stumbled upon death. The creamy countenance of the youth’s skin belied nothing to the contrary and it was only when he saw the tranquil heaving of the boy’s chest that he calmed. When his head, coiled tense with the thought of what might have been, managed to unwind, his eyes retraced the boy’s soft features and carefully inventoried the freckles that dusted every possible surface of his face. Above lay a sweep of dark lashes and heavy brows drawn in some phantom concentration. Below, a pair of pinkened lips, slightly parted with each intake of breath. On a second survey, Hermann noticed the boy was dressed rather lightly in a thin white cotton tunic, stained and mottled in places, and a pair of slightly frayed flannel pants. Hermann was allowed a view of varicose veins and restless toes on bare feet. At a small distance, Hermann remembered seeing a discarded pair of thick-rimmed glasses gleaming in the low light. Though the attire was favorable for the duration of the day, it could get quite cold at night. Hermann wondered.

The boy made a strange and phantasmal image in the concentrated tangle of brambles. Shadows fell in long strokes around the boy, as if his calm glow was impermeable. Suddenly, the creature moved with the smallest of inconvenienced sounds, and it startled Hermann so badly that he fled as a colt would to its mother. It had been so inconsequential a thing that to call it a movement would have been almost an exaggeration, and yet it had terrified Hermann. To see that immobile body suddenly imbued with _life_ was for some reason a terribly petrifying idea. The eerily ethereal face in the damp green was made to stay immobile—in imitation of one of the paintings in his father’s study. Trembling hands gathered the wood, which seemed more wet and limp than it had before, and Hermann made his steady way away from the outcrop, and the maze, and the hissing shadows that guarded their secret child.

There was no escape from the fluctuating barrage on his asthmatic lungs. Both inside and outside, the wet heat bore heavily on his chest. By the time he arrived back at the house, his breath came out with little whistling pants. He could hear his father’s voice obnoxiously loud from his study. No doubt he was speaking on the phone. Before the man could make his presence known, Hermann hurried to the fireplace and set the kindling in the firebox. His fingers skimmed the mantel shelf for the hidden matchbox and swiftly lit one. Hermann couldn’t say why he let it burn until it scalded the tips of his fingers, before letting it fall amongst the gathered branches. At first he was worried the fire wouldn’t catch, because it felt so impossibly humid, but the embers did rise slowly. He stared at the flames for a moment, clutching his smarting fingers to his chest. His mind traveled again to that youth in the weeds and a shiver dragged down his spine.

Abruptly, he escaped to the library. It would be hours yet for their guests to arrive and Lars had not yet told him if he would be restricted to one of the rooms, or if he’d be toted around. In the meantime, he amused himself with a lazy reading of one of the many musty books in the library. It was an old and outdated tome on mathematics that occupied him that afternoon. The books were a comfort because they spoke to him in a way those around him could not. No one else had the patience or the knowledge to understand the things written in the tomes, so it gave him a particular pleasure to know they were for his eyes only. That evening, however, his mind kept drifting. It kept thinking of moonskin and brown flecks haphazardly strewn all over visible flesh. There was a terrible nagging feeling that he had left something abandoned in that clearing. It was a gut feeling, and those did not make sense to Hermann. It was not logical. 

But, a boy left in a clearing was hardly something he could remotely consider logical. Such a thing was much like what one would read in fiction but would not expect to occur. Despite himself, all sorts of hypotheses were popping into his head and he gradually found himself working up his own curiosity to unbearable heights. The equation-speak in his book went unread and his eyes rested on the shelves, seeing the image of the ghost of a boy in their place. This was how Brian found him.

“Oi! Quit daydreaming. Papa’s been looking for you for the past hour.” The last sentence made Brian’s lips curl into a smirk as he disappeared from the doorframe. Hermann’s breath caught and he scrambled to get out of the chair. As it was, whether he went to confront Lars or ran away to his room, the situation didn’t bode well for him. Lars was a stern and demanding man. To be kept waiting was of the utmost disrespect. Hermann was not a particularly brave person, and that day had been strange and jarring enough as it was. He retreated to his room as quickly and as quietly as he could. The longer he could postpone his sentence, the better.

Once he was safely locked in his room, he started to change out of his clothes—just in case. The clothes that replaced his previous ones were hardly any different, but they were fresh and didn’t cling to him with sweat or house-silt. It didn’t take long for him to hear the loud steps taken up the staircase to his room. He grimaced with each forceful knock to his door.

“Hermann,” his father growled, all dominance. “As usual, you’ve left the house a sty. Can you not follow simple orders?” Lars tried the door, doorknob jiggling when he found it locked. “You won’t let me in?” After a pause fraught with tension, he spoke again. “I suppose it’ll have to do. You won’t be joining us for dinner, ungrateful child.” The steps retreated before Hermann could get in a word edgewise, even if he had wanted to. What his father meant by those words was that Hermann would be getting no dinner at all, if he had his way. Just as well—small talk had never been his forte and the thought of being under his father’s disapproving glare more than necessary made his fingers twitch for his inhaler.

Just as tediously, he stripped back out of the fresh clothes and remained in his underclothes. The sky darkened steadily outside his window and brought a soothing cool with it. It wasn’t long until the guests arrived. Their car rattled down the long cobblestoned path up to the house until its owners stepped out with carelessly slammed doors. Their perfumes wafted up strongly and Hermann was further relieved to have been spared the meeting. Even through the floorboards he could hear their high nasal voices— _Oh, Lillian, you do look lovely!_ —and how duly impressed they seemed. That would please Lars immensely, no doubt.

Hermann gave into the exhaustion tugging at his limbs, noting his displeased stomach’s rumble as something almost foreign and external. The bed dipped below him without a single sound and he pulled the covers over himself, squeezing his eyes closed tightly against the unwelcome but not unfamiliar pang of hunger. Through his open window, the noises of night creatures could be heard—and, above all that, the sudden mournful scream of a loon broke above the carefully orchestrated cacophony and left Hermann feeling a strange uneasiness as he drifted off to sleep.


	2. II

_“I will arise and go now, for always night and day_

_I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;_

_While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,_

_I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”_

_–W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”_

 

“One of the Yancy brothers disappeared last night,” Hermann overheard his step-mother tell his father the next day. She was inappropriately excited about the news. Nothing much happened in the surrounding town, so it was a well-earned excitement, but it made Hermann feel a bad foreboding. The boy he found the day before came to mind, but he knew the Yancy brothers were much younger than the youth he’d seen. “They say they’ve found him—what’s left of him—strewn lakeside.” She lowered her voice, but Hermann discreetly crept closer in order to listen. “It was his innards. Kidneys and liver and intestines and all just out on the grass.” From his vantage point he could see how her hand gripped the wine stem. His father finally turned from his newspaper, mouth downturned as it was wont to do.

“Lillian, you should not listen to such morbid things,” He said disapprovingly. Hermann chose that moment to retreat but the movement drew the man’s attention. “Ah, Hermann, finally you’ve come down.” It was quite early in the day. Hermann had not slept in and yet the man oozed disappointment. Hermann turned around, wiping the grimace from his face and masking it behind a politely blank façade. “Come, join your mother and me for breakfast. You must be quite hungry.” The words weren’t even a smidge remorseful and Hermann felt the familiar coils of anger settle heavily on his chest. He took a moment to steady himself before he approached dutifully and took a seat at the dining table.

Hermann filled his plate generously, piling things as hunger dictated and ignoring the way Lars watched his every movement with satisfaction. He was in a better mood than usual—the results of the previous night. “We exhausted some of the things in the pantry,” his father said casually. Hermann would be going to town, then. The thought brightened him up a bit. “Brian and I will be going into town to buy his books.” And that, effectively, brought his good mood crashing down again. Not only was there no mention of Hermann’s well-needed textbooks for the coming semester, but they would be accompanying him on his trip to the town. To add insult to injury, Brian probably would not open the books more than once. Hermann kept his thoughts to himself, nodding half-heartedly. It was enough for his father, because he didn’t initiate a conversation for the remainder of the meal.

All day he walked with sea-sloshed legs as if he were a sailor unused to stable land under his feet once more. His head rang with the sounds of a phantasmal tide and he felt as if a string had been carefully tied to his diaphragm and someone was insistently pulling on the other side. It made him restless and just slightly manic. There was a longing he could not place—a direction he was constantly seeking out and looking at from the town. The nagging feeling that he had to go somewhere—be somewhere, elsewhere—doggedly pursued him.

On more than one occasion Hermann found himself dropping behind his father and brother to clutch at a wall and avoid emptying his stomach. He was unable to prevent the one time he dry heaved until he felt wretched, sweat clinging to him and his chest contracting in painful spasms. His breathing went ragged afterwards and he had to lean back against the wall and slip the inhaler in his mouth until it was normal again. That was how his brother and father found him. Lars frowned at him imperiously and Hermann suspected the man would have rather heard he choked to death. He didn’t ask Hermann if he was alright, just waited impatiently until he could walk again and then he promptly drove them back to the mansion. Brian taunted him the whole way, mocking him for being unable to walk down a simple boulevard. Hermann didn’t respond, which was usual, but it was because his mind was a swaying noise of waves and seafoam. If he opened his mouth the shore would surely roll out in an inelegant burble.

The next couple of days were not much better. 

It was inexplicable—the way he kept returning to that spot at the mouth of the maze. His mind always brought up the memory of the laureled boy sleeping so peacefully in the outcrop, but he always forced himself away determinedly. His curiosity ate at him insistently, but his mind held very loud reservations about the maze. He’d traveled it almost in a haze the last time, shrouded in darkness even under the brightest of sunlight. There was something lurking—watching in the pitch black beyond the entryway. His skin would prickle with gooseflesh at each pass and his head would swim with the sounds of ebbing water. Previously steady legs would tremble with phantom memory of being sea-bound on a swaying deck. And throughout it all, the strong pull on his midsection like a compass to that portico.

At night, when he was curled in his bed with the covers over him, it was worse. The roiling shift in his stomach did not abate and his dreams were plagued by the terrifying certainty that he was being stalked with calculated precision. He woke with a barely restrained scream lodged in his throat and the paranoid fear that whatever was watching him had caught up with him. The entryway to the maze was always there, sometimes as subject and sometimes just in the periphery. Even his father seemed to notice he was haunted. The man would stop, open his mouth to say something and close it again while drawing his brows further together. He was—misplacing things—names. And always—that endless tide.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, man!!! I'm so sorry this update took so long ohmygosh. My computer died pathetically and my courses have been...a lot... anyways... hope ya'll enjoy!

III.

_“ ‘Tis Fancy’s land to which thou sett’st thy feet;_

_Where still, ‘tis said, the fairy people meet_

_Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill.”_

_—William Collins, “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry”_

 

It was a week later when Hermann finally approached the looming walls of landscaped shrubbery. There were dark smudges under his eyes from a crushing exhaustion that lingered on him like the faint smell of ozone. He still didn’t dare enter the maze and chance getting lost in the green’s labyrinthine depths. Confronting the source of his uneasiness was his last resort with most things and the dreadful cold that would grip him when he walked past that entrance made it no easier. All the same, he unfolded the quilt he brought with him— _a square: relation of two triangles calculable by 2(a 2 \+ b2 = c2)—_and sat at the proverbial mouth of the lion’s den. He carefully placed the big tome he brought on the spread blanket and followed it in seating himself. It was easy to lose himself in the easy cadence of theoreticals and the mental calculations of the strength and quantity of external forces (hypothetically, of course) he would need to slingshot his exhaustion _directly to hell._

Minutes, then hours, passed with Hermann steadily ignoring the slithering and prickling he got from sitting cross-legged just out of reach of the long shadows. It was a slow realization, when it came, that the sensation of being watched was more concrete. The fine hairs at the nape of his neck rose and he humored his paranoia by raising his head from his book and peeking out into the dark portal. Seconds passed in a strangely hushed calm as everything—the rustling trees, the chirping birds—seemed to settle around him. His breathing caught in his throat, pulse loud in his ears and his grip white-knuckled on the book. Out from the shadows a pale foot, followed by a stretch of bare calf, appeared. The boy approached slowly, quietly, assessing. He was dressed in the same clothes as when Hermann had seen him last. Both the pants and the tunic were looking a bit more worn and branch-snagged, but those were the only things that looked poorly on the boy. Now awake and imbued with movement, Hermann had trouble seeing the boy as anything other than some rebellious subject that decided to leave its painting. The soft curls of his neck-length hair shivered a bit in a sudden wind that brought the damp smell directly to Hermann. The missing detail of the boy’s feature had been his glinting green eyes. An alertness was there, behind the glasses that now sat crookedly on his nose. Hermann got the distinct impression of being inspected.

The boy’s heavy gaze was languid as it took him in from head to toe in absolute silence. A manic energy— _tesla coils_ —spiked the air around this ghoul of a boy. Hermann found that he couldn’t take his eyes away from— _a halo of light on the crown of his hair until it burned auburn, freckles like careless Pollock-dribbles, wrists curving inwards as if holding a limp weight at his side—_ his figure as he was practically dressed-down. Satisfied, the boy’s green eyes flickered back up to meet Hermann’s and a startled cough was ripped from him.

“Who are you?” Hermann wheezed out pathetically, wincing at the way he rasped. The boy tilted his head, eyes flashing dangerously for a moment as his lips pressed into a thin line that could mean nothing but bad things. He didn’t answer, just prowled closer until he was standing right at the border of the shadows, so close Hermann could touch him if he extended his arm. With an eerie amount of grace for someone his apparent age, the brunette sat down all liquid and his fingers skimmed the flat heart of the book in Hermann’s lap. The movement indicated no apprehension and the watchful gaze that accompanied it carried a steady intent. Hermann swallowed thickly and shifted on the blanket, momentarily wiping his hands on his upper thighs.

“Physics,” Hermann said by way of explanation and the boy’s fingers paused in their skimming. He didn’t say anything but he nodded and pulled away. Hermann was unable to draw him into conversation, no matter what he did, but the boy didn’t leave. He stayed on, watching quietly and unnervingly as Hermann tersely went back to reading. It was a charade of sorts, Hermann passing the pages and eyes roving over the pages but taking in _absolutely nothing_. How could he with that stripping gaze on him? The most frustrating thing was how self-aware the boy seemed—how comfortable he was in his own skin. Whenever Hermann braved raising his own gaze to the boy, he was met with unwavering simple green. There was no hesitation, and Hermann was always the one to look away back to safety. Though the boy didn’t speak, he was never immobile. It was like he vibrated in place with the thrilling shift of poorly-hidden excitement.

Hermann stayed until it began to go dark. When he got up, the boy looked startled and scrambled to his feet in a flurry of limbs that was much more appropriate to someone with that kind of softness in the face. The movement knocked his glasses slightly askew and made Hermann huff out a stifled laugh. Before he quite realized what he was doing, he leaned closer and adjusted the frames, hand lingering on the wood when he caught the expression on his companion’s face. It was a soft wonder so un-adultered that Hermann jerked back his hand as if burnt. He opened his mouth to apologize, to say goodbye, to not look like an idiot, and closed it again without saying anything. The quilt and book were gathered into his hands haphazardly and he rushed off without even a parting word to the boy, but he felt a gaze on him as firmly as a cool finger pressed to the back of his neck.

This unpredictable interaction happened strangely. Though the waterlogged sensation dimmed down, the desire to go back to the portal did not. Hermann returned day after day, at sporadically different hours, to sit before the entrance to the maze. Every time the boy would come unbidden and Hermann would wonder how he knew to come. He never seemed to be lying in wait and he always appeared from the pitch black.

**Author's Note:**

> I made both Lillian and Brian up for my own purposes, but Bastien, Dietrich, and Karla will appear as well!! This is painfully un-betaed, so if there are any errors please point them out to me. Kudos and comments are appreciated!


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